Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Website: www.steamthing.com

Biography

My name is Caleb Crain. I'm a writer—of fiction and nonfiction—and I live in Brooklyn with my husband, Peter Terzian, and our dog.

In 1999 I got a Ph.D. from Columbia University's English department. Then I worked for about a year as a senior editor at the magazine Lingua Franca. In the 2002-2003 academic year I was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. From 2003 to 2006 I taught as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia.

The journal n+1 published my novella "Sweet Grafton" in its winter 2008 issue. Penguin will be publishing my novel Necessary Errors as a paperback original in August 2013. I've also written review-essays for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. In most cases, when an essay appeared, I published on this blog a reporter's notebook—a sort of annotated bibliography of print and online sources that I consulted in my research.

My book American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation was published by Yale in 2001 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local library). It was reviewed by American Literary History, Early American Literature, Common-Place.org, and Newsday, among others. I wrote introductions and notes to the Modern Library's 2002 editions of Royall Tyler's Algerine Captive (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local library) and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local library).

On 8 December 2009, I moderated a panel for n+1 on "Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual" (video here). On 23 September 2010, I gave a lecture on "Melville's Secrets" at SUNY Geneseo, for the annual Walter Harding lecture (video here). From time to time I've been interviewed on the radio.

This blog won the 2007 Cliopatria Award for Best Writer. The title comes from The Trippings of Tom Pepper, a novel by Charles Frederick Briggs first serialized in 1846. The hero, a boy named Tom Pepper, has stowed away on a schooner. The sailors hear him knocking things over and decide he's a ghost. This puts them in a melancholy mood, and one evening in the forecastle they reminisce about the good old days, while the hidden Tom Pepper eavesdrops. One of them says, self-pityingly, "Steamboats are ruining everything." What I love about the quote is that you get the sense that Briggs, who was himself a runaway sailor in his youth, like his friend Melville, thinks the same thing, but prudently puts the sentiment into the mouth of a superstitious, nostalgic old coot.

The image in the banner is of the steamboat The Royal Tar, which caught fire and sank in Penobscot Bay on October 25, 1836; a menagerie of wild animals on board perished. The engraving is from Steamboat Disasters and Railroad Accidents in the United States (Worcester, 1846).

Writing

Below are links to some articles that I've written, in reverse chronological order.

"Havel's Specter," The Nation, 9 April 2012

Václav Havel's philosophy as manifested in his plays, his essays, and his political career

"An Introduction to A Game of Hide-and-Seek," 14 February 2012

My introduction to the NYRB Classics reprint of Elizabeth Taylor's 1951 novel

"Fair and Balanced," The Nation, 6 February 2012

A review of two recent books on copyright and fair use by William Patry and by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi

"Lost in the Meritocracy," New York Times Book Review, 1 May 2011

A review of Professor X's In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

"Tea and Antipathy," The New Yorker, 20/27 December 2010 (blog notebook)

Was the Tea Party even such a good idea the first time around?

"The Early Literature of New York's Moneyed Class," The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, 2010 (blog notebook)

Lifestyles of the rich and famous, 1852 edition

"Beer Buddies," Bookforum, February/March 2010

A review of Richard Stott's "Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in 19th-Century America"

"Terms of Infringement," The National (Abu Dhabi), 21 January 2010

A review of Adrian Johns's "Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates"

"Semantic Time Travel," New York Times Magazine, 10 January 2010

On the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

"Against Camel Case," New York Times Magazine, 29 November 2009 (blog notebook)

A polemic, attacking the corporate practice of capitalizing letters inside compound words

"Keats Speaks," New York Times Magazine, 1 November 2009 (reporter's notebook)

Did the real Keats talk the way the one in Jane Campion's movie does?

"A Very Different Pakistan," New York Review of Books, 5 November 2009 (reporter's notebook)

A review of Daniyal Mueenuddin's short story collection "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders"

"It Happened One Decade," The New Yorker, 21 September 2009 (related blog posts on Nathanael West and James Agee)

The arts during the Great Depression

"Bootylicious," The New Yorker, 7 September 2009 (reporter's notebook)

The anarchy and economics of the pirates of the Caribbean

"Nice Work If You Can Get It," The National (Abu Dhabi), 2 July 2009

A review of Matthew B. Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft"

"Toil and Trouble," New York Times Book Review, 28 June 2009

A review of Alain de Botton's "Sorrows and Pleasures of Work"

"Brother, Can You Spare a Room?" New York Times Book Review, 29 March 2009

On a reprint of a satiric 1857 guide to boardinghouse life in New York, featuring drunken landladies and snoring bedmates

"Random Facts of Kindness," The National (Abu Dhabi), 27 February 2009

Historian Barbara Taylor and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips collaborate on a description and defense of kindness

"There Was Blood," The New Yorker, 19 January 2009 (reporter's notebook). Rpt. in The Energy Reader, ed. Laura Nader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

Two new books on the 1913-14 Colorado coalminers' strike that led to the Ludlow Massacre

"Children of the Left, Unite!" New York Times Book Review, 11 January 2009

Socialism has been trickling into the ears of American youth for a century

"Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags and Cougar Bait," The Nation, 29 December 2008

Notes on slang

"Good at Being Gods," London Review of Books, 18 December 2008 (reporter's notebook)

Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, solar panels, windmills, Jimmy Carter, and the return of ecology as a business model

"A World of a Different Color," New York Times Book Review, 30 November 2008 (reporter's notebook)

A review of Ann Norton Greene's "Horses at Work"

"Lonely Together," The National (Abu Dhabi), 31 October 2008

A review of two books on loneliness, one scientific and one politico-philosophical

"English, the Omnivorous Tongue," New York Sun, 4 September 2008

A review of Henry Hitchings's "The Secret Life of Words"

"In Praise of Spiders," London Review of Books, 11 September 2008

On Wilkie Collins's novel "The Woman in White" and the art of training human beings to submit to your nefarious wishes

"Move Closer, Please," New York Review of Books, 1 May 2008 (reporter's notebook)

The history of the snapshot in America, and how it became art

"Twilight of the Books," The New Yorker, 24 December 2007 (reporter's notebook; en español; en français). Rpt. in The Best of Technology Writing 2008, ed. Clive Thompson (University of Michigan Press, 2008).

How the decline of reading may alter the social world

"Sweet Grafton," n+1, Winter 2007-08

A novella

"There She Blew," The New Yorker, 23 July 2007 (reporter's notebook)

The rise and fall of U.S. whaling, and the truth about sperm-squeezing

"The Miracle Woman," New York Review of Books, 19 July 2007 (reporter's notebook)

The mysterious disappearance and continuing legacy of early 20th-century radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson

"Bad Precedent," The New Yorker, 29 January 2007 (reporter's notebook)

Andrew Jackson, habeas corpus, and the War of 1812

"Mother of Exiles," New York Times Book Review, 31 December 2006

Review of "Emma Lazarus," by Esther Schor

"The Courtship of Henry Wikoff; or, A Spinster's Apprehensions," American Literary History, Winter 2006

How a con man kidnapped an heiress, went to jail, and turned his adventure into a best-seller

"Surveillance Society: The Mass-Observation Movement and the Meaning of Everyday Life," The New Yorker, 11 September 2006 (reporter's notebook)

How a poet, a filmmaker, and an anthropologist convinced 1930s Britain to observe and document itself

"Academic Criticism," n+1, Spring 2006

How single-author criticism resembles music fandom, or ought to

"Reverie on a Breeze," Boston Globe, 6 August 2006

On a sleepless night, thinking of literature when the electric fan fails

"Approaching Infinity," Boston Globe, October 2003 (blog supplement). Rpt. in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

An interview with David Foster Wallace about writing novels, riding the Green Line, and higher math

"In Search of Lost Crime," Legal Affairs, 1.2 (July/August 2002): 28-33

Bloated bodies, bigamous love, drunk stenographers, and other literary pleasures of the 19th-century trial transcript

"The Artistic Animal," Lingua Franca, October 2001

The self-made scholar Ellen Dissanayake links evolution and the arts

"The Monarch of Dreams," The New Republic 224 (28 May 2001), pp. 41-48

On the fantasy life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, abolitionist and Emily Dickinson's friend

"Infidelity: Milan Kundera Is on the Outs with His Translators, but Who's Betraying Whom?" Lingua Franca, October 1999

After years of feuding with his translators, Kundera began not only retranslating his novels but also rewriting them.

"Frank O'Hara's 'Fired' Self," American Literary History 9.2 (1997): 287-308

Reading O'Hara's poems in light of the psychology of D. W. Winnicott

"Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville's Novels," American Literature 66.1 (March 1994): 25–53

The unspeakable things that can happen in a boat